Paid hosting for your philosophy websites

There are probably as many paid hosts seeking your custom as there are free hosts. What they offer can be quite confusing at first. One of the most important things when choosing a free host is to find one that has good support. And by good support I mean emails answered with a few hours, 12hrs at the most. The best thing to do is choose a host recommended by someone your trust or go for one of the more well-known companies.

Choosing a paid host for your site

It won't surprise you to find that different sites have different hosting needs. If you are planning to host lots of large movie files and galleries of pictures (unlikely with a philosophy site) then you will need a large amount of webspace and a huge amount of bandwidth. Let's take a look at webspace and bandwidth.

Webspace

This refers to how large your entire site will be on the host's servers. For example if you create a page that is 50kb then you will require 50kb of space to host your page. If you have been given 10MB of webspace you can have:

10(50kb X 20 = 1000kb or 1MB) or 200 50kb pages

Okay that's a very over-complicated way of putting it! Basically, twenty 50kb pages would need 1000kb or 1MB of webspace. If your host has given you 10MB of space then you can have 10 lots of 20 pages or 200 such pages. Of course you could have 1 X 10MB page if you wanted to.

10 MB is actually quite stingy, most free hosts will give you a lot more. Cheap paid hosting will given you at least 500MB.

Bandwidth

Everytime some views a page of your site on their computer they download that page from your host. If you have a 50kb page then it 'costs you' 50kb of bandwidth everytime someone visits it. Suppose your host gives you 100MB of bandwidth a month and your sites consists of one page, 1MB in size. This would mean that your page could be visited 100 times before you exceeded your bandwidth. What happens when you exceed your bandwidth? If you have a free host they would probably temporarily suspend your account. With paid hosting, depending on the host, they would either suspend your account or charge you for extra bandwidth usage.

New webmasters worry unnecessarily about bandwidth. Firstly, you need to consider that to exceed your bandwidth allowance you need visitors and lots of them. Most new sites wish they had bandwidth issues! Secondly, bandwidth is only really an issue for image and video intensive websites. This page is 35kb, the banner at the top makes up 23kb of that, imagine if I had a gallery of 20 images on this page or I was hosting videos. A single video could be 100MB or more - which means that it would cost me 1GB (1000mb) of bandwidth for every 10 visitors downloading a single video. If you are hosting a largely text website then you don't really need to worry about bandwidth at all.

My host gives me 500MB of storage and 6GB of bandwidth which is more than enough for this site.

It is important to consider how much webspace/bandwidth you are going to need. Don't be persuaded into buying more than you'll ever need. For a philosophy site you don't need to pay £100 a month for gigabites of storage and bandwidth. In fact, you shouldn't need to pay much more than £5 a month.